No night of the long anti-R2P knives

As Emily reported yesterday, the President of the General Assembly convened a panel discussion yesterday that wasn’t exactly friendly toward the Responsibility to Protect. This was, as I explained earlier, part of an unfortunate PGA power play (no, that’s not a mixed sports metaphor) to back off from R2P. But to hear The Economist tell it, it was practically an anti-R2P putsch.

Contrary to The Economist‘s salacious wording, I don’t think it’s worth affording this week’s discussions the gravity of a “campaign to sabotage R2P.” Nor did it occur “in defiance of Ban Ki-moon,” who gave his remarks a couple days before the actual debate, making the savvy argument to not replace the “substance” of R2P with the “rancor” of politically fraught debate.

There are critics of R2P, to be sure, some legitimate, but many brandishing misconstructions of the doctrine as a sort of handy fig leaf for neocolonialism. What they are brandishing, however, are the sharpened “knives” with with The Economistclaims certain governments are attempting to “unravel” R2P. The responsibility to protect is not going to collapse because of this week’s discussion, past Security Council resolutions are not going to “un-invoke” R2P, and, hopefully, the debate will progress to the level of how best to prevent mass atrocities and protect civilian populations.